6 ms·

I guess I’m just a crusty ol’ greybeard C++ developer, but it seems like a video editor is out of place in a document browser. There’s a perfectly good native o

I guess I’m just a crusty ol’ greybeard C++ developer, but it seems like a video editor is out of place in a document browser. There’s a perfectly good native operating system that nobody uses any more. If we think we need a more thoroughly virtualized machine than traditional operating system processes give us (which I think is obvious), then we should be honest and build a virtualization abstraction that is actually what we want, rather than converting a document reader into a video editor…

jayd16 1y ago
But that's what they're doing. The hard part isn't the VM. The hard part is the long fought functional yet secure sandbox that a browser provides.
- bsder 1y ago
  > functional yet secure Secure? Debatable. Functional? Not really. For example, try accessing a security key and watch the fun. Sure, if you access it exactly the way Google wants you to, things kinda-sorta work, sometimes. If you don't want to obey your Google masters, good luck getting your Bluetooth or USB packet to your security key. And because you are "secure", you can't store anything on the local hard drive. Oh, and you can't send a real network packet either. All you can do is send a supplication request to a network database owned by somebody else that holds your data--"Please, sir, can I have some more?". The fact that this prevents you from exporting your data away from cloud-centered SaaS providers is purely coincidental, I'm sure. </sarcasm> So in the name of security we just kneecap the end users--if the users can't do anything, they're secure, right? Diana Moon Glampers would be proud.
  - jayd16 1y ago
    I'm not sure what any of that means but people like wasm because the web sandbox does work for many cases. No one is saying it solves every single use case and it doesn't need to.
wyldfire 1y ago
> ... document browser ... document reader ... I'm going to assume you're being sincere. But even the crustiest among us can recognize that the modern purpose for web browsers is not (merely) documents. Chances are, many folks on HN in the last month have booked tickets for a flight or bought a home or a car or watched a cat video using the "document browser". > If we think we need a more thoroughly virtualized machine than traditional operating system processes give us (which I think is obvious)... Like ... the WASM virtual machine? What if the WASM virtual machine were the culmination of learning from previous not-quite-good-enough VMs? WASM -- despite its name -- is not truly bound to the "document" browser.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445 https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser... >Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).”
- pjmlp 1y ago
  We have, but not by choice, I miss my native apps, even though ChromeOS Platform pays the bills.
  - adrianton3 1y ago
    > booked tickets for a flight or bought a home or a car or watched a cat video Would you install a native app to book a flight? One for each company? Download updates for them every now and then, uninstall them when you run out of disk space etc I can ask the same question about every other activity we do in these non-native apps.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      I have installed all them on the phone, so yes. Unfortunely several of them are glorified webviews. I am old enough to have lived through the days Internet meant a set of networking protocols, not ChromeOS Platform. And on those days hard disks were still bloody expensive, by the way.
xmichael909 1y ago
Personally not a fan of Windows 95 in the browser, however the browser stoped being a “document reader” a decade ago it’s the only universel, sandbox runtime, and everything is moving in that direction ... safe code. WASM isnt a worst VM; it’s a diffrent trade off: portable, fast start, capability scoped compute without shiping a OS. Raw device still have their place (servers). If you need safe distribution + performance thats “good enough” WASM in the browser is going to be the future of client.
- oblio 1y ago
  A decade ago? Gmail was launched in 2004, 21 years ago.
  - blackoil 1y ago
    XMLHttpRequest was part of IE5 in 1999 as an ActiveXObject. Outlook Web team built it a year earlier.
  - ifwinterco 1y ago
    Not to mention Java applets which is how you would do this sort of thing in the early 2000s
imoverclocked 1y ago
There are projects to run WASM on bare metal. I do agree that we tend to run a lot in a web-browser or browser environment though. It seems like a pattern that started as a hack but grew into its own thing through convenience. It would be interesting to sit down with a small group and figure out exactly what is good/bad about it and design a new thing around the desired pattern that doesn't involve a browser-in-the-loop.
- syndeo 1y ago
  > run WASM on bare metal Heh, reminds me of those boxes Sun used to make that only ran Java. (I don’t know how far down Java actually went; perhaps it was Solaris for the lower layers now that I think about it…)
  - imoverclocked 1y ago
    With hypervisors and a Linux kernel doing the heavy lifting, the WASM on bare metal probably just looks a lot like a regular process. I would bet Sun did similar … minus the hypervisor. I do miss the Solaris 10/OpenSolaris tech though. I don’t know anything that comes close to it today.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Solaris is still around, while OpenSolaris forks support Oxide endeavours.
      - imoverclocked 1y ago
        Technically, yes. I built+ported a majority of Debian packages onto Nexenta OS but that effort (and many parallel efforts) just vanished when Oracle purchased Sun. I don't miss SVR4 packages and I never grew fond of IPS. So many open-source folk warned of the dangers of CDDL and they were largely realized in fairly short time. Unsurprisingly, #opensolaris on irc also had a precipitous drop-off around the same time. dtrace/zones/smf/zfs/iscsi/... and the integration between them all was top notch. One could create a zone, spin up a clone, do some computation, trash the filesystem and then just throw the clone away... in very short time. Also, that whole loop happened without interacting with zfs directly; I know that some of these things have been ported but the ports miss the integration. eg: zfs on Linux is just a filesystem. zfs on Solaris was the base of a bunch of technology. smf tied much of it together. eg: dtrace gave you access all the way down to individual read/write operations per disk in a raid-z and all the way up to the top of your application running inside of a zone. One tool with massive reach and very little overhead. Not much compels me to go back to the ecosystem; I've been burned once already.
RussianCow 1y ago
The browser removes the friction of needing to install specialized software locally, which is HUGE when you want people to actually use your software. Figma would have been dead in the water if it wasn't stupidly simple to share a design via a URL to anyone with a computer and an internet connection.
- zeroq 1y ago
  I can't shake the feeling that this ship has sailed and only a few got to get on it while it happened. And this comes from someone who started with Flash, built actual video editing apps with it, and for the last 25 years build application with "it's not a web app, it's a desktop app that lives in a browser" attitude [1]. Even with Flash we often used hybrid approach where you had two builds from same codebase - a lite version running in the browser and an optional desktop app (AIR) with full functionality. ShareObjects and LocalConnection made this approach extremely feasible as both instances were aware of each other and you could move data and objects between them in real time. The premise is great, but it was never fully realized - sure you have few outliers like Figma, but building a real "desktop app" in a browser comes with a lot of quirks, and the resulting UX is just terrible in most cases. [1] just to be clear, there's a huge difference between web page and web app ;D
chrsig 1y ago
Think of it like emacs. Browsers are perfectly good operating systems just needing a better way to view the web.
- mwcz 1y ago
  That's too true to be funny!
FpUser 1y ago
I a 64yo fart. Started programming with machine codes. Native is my bread and butter. Still have no problems and am using browser as a deployment platform for some type of applications. Almost each thing has it's own use.
willtemperley 1y ago
Plenty of people still want local-first apps that function offline.
- djxfade 1y ago
  Totally possible today with modern SPA technology that all major browsers support
  - willtemperley 1y ago
    So where are they?
    - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
      Flutter?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - willtemperley 1y ago
        Is Flutter an SPA framework?
        SJC_Hacker 1y ago
        Yes
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    You mean the convoluted enginnering exercise of service workers, in-browser proxies, and in-browser databases to simulate something native platforms don't need to care about?
blackoil 1y ago
Security model of web is needed to be brought to the OS.
ivell 1y ago
I would argue that as soon as it was decided to include JavaScript runtime in the browser, it stopped being a plain document browser. From then on, we were just on the evolutionary path of converting it from a low capability app sandbox to a highly capable one.
flohofwoe 1y ago
The problem is: even us old timers can't deny nor change the fact that operating systems have been putting up barriers to disallow running untrusted code downloaded from the internet. Try to distribute an installer on Windows that isn't signed with an extensive EV-certificate for instance. It's scare popup galore. Not to mention the closed gardens of the Apple and Google Stores which even when you get in, you can be kicked out again for absolutely no objective reason (they don't even need to tell you why). > then we should be honest and build a virtualization abstraction that is actually what we want, This is not in the interest of Microsoft, Google or Apple. They can't put the open web back into the box (yet, anyway), but they will not support any new attempts to create an open software ecosystem on "their" platforms.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Just wait until the Web finally becomes ChromeOS Platform, after the Safari barrier is out of the way.
GeneralMaximus 1y ago
There is no difference between a "document" and an "app". There has never been a difference between the two, it's a purely artificial distinction. Word and LibreOffice "documents" can run embedded macros. Emacs has `org-mode`, which can call out to any programming language on your $PATH. A PDF document is produced by running code in a stack-based virtual machine. Even fonts have bytecode instructions embedded inside them that are used for hinting. If by "document" you mean "static text with no executable bits", then only plain text files can truly be called documents. Everything else is a computer program, and has been since the dawn of computing.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- incrudible 1y ago
  I don’t think the total dissolution of a blurry boundary is a useful act. Yes, many document formats become Turing complete and run Doom eventually, but there is still a notable practical distinction between the intent to create a document interpreter versus an application framework.
- muyuu 1y ago
  the loose implication is that documents don't have access to resources outside of itself and they're somewhat static imo when you start talking about dynamic documents the distinction starts to blur but it should be fine if it's just a few parameters that are meant to be manually updated... beyond that "document" seems like the wrong term (and tech) those artificial distinctions are essential and perfectly practical as they can convey expectations just fine GP is correct in that the browser has generalised to a point it has clear drawbacks for its original intended purpose, but that is just a fact of life at this point IMO, html should have scaled back from 5.0 to the feature-set of 4, if not 3, with mass deprecations and beyond that it shouldn't be called html even if the main browsers carried on adding features and interoperable OS-like characteristics, so people could see beforehand if they were visiting hypertext documents or application sites, because certainly most of the web right now could not be reasonably called "hypertext" but that isn't the way it was handled and tbh it was to be expected
- 1y ago
Certhas 1y ago
PostScript is turing complete. SVG almost got the ability to open raw network sockets. Word files were (are?) a common platform for distributing malware.
RiverCrochet 1y ago
The browser became an app engine so app developers could escape the Wintel monopoly that was pretty tight in the 90's and 00's when the Internet became a thing. These days, it's so there can be apps outside of app stores. There's been various attempts to build "Internet operating systems" that are little more than a browser (that's what Chrome OS was intended to be in the beginning I thought) but Windows and it's pre-internet legacies are so entrenched in PCs and corporate life that nothing's ever gonna change there until Microsoft makes the entirety of Windows an app.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
.NET does this and nowadays you can compile most of your .NET code to machine code, it only keeps bytecode for the reflection pieces of code, but everything else is Ahead of Timed iirc basically you get all the VM benefits, and some native speeds in one go.
scotty79 1y ago
Basically OS developer dropped the ball. Internet caught them by surprise and few decades is apparently too short for them to come up with new appealing abstractions to fit the new environment. So browser developers took over and did just that. Same way webdevs ate desktop app dev's lunch because they had no idea how to innovate on decade old ideas. To sum up, no matter how well you are positioned for something on paper, if you won't do it, someone else will.
sharts 1y ago
The browser has become the operating system for a while now because native OS things were too fragmented and too slow to keep pace with what people wanted.
tester756 1y ago
I feel way safer using apps inside web browser than installing / executing them directly on my PC.
retrochameleon 1y ago
I'm a fan of the browser becoming a sandbox for much more than "documents". It has the most developed, flexible, and powerful UI system ever, it established numerous standards that pervade modern software development, and it's already available as one of the most cross-platform standard utilities. If the browser sandbox is a reliable cross-platform sandbox, the potential to develop and distribute software is huge. Progressive Web Apps are awesome because you can visit the website and use it normally, and then click a button to "install" the website to your device. If designed correctly, the website can work offline. By doing this, you get free distribution, automatic updates, no app stores, an excellent platform to develop an app on top of (the browser), etc. I think PWAs are the future, but the web platform still has some ways to go. There are numerous amazing examples of what you can accomplish with PWAs in their current state, though.
300hoogen 1y ago
lmfao

jayd16 1y ago

But that's what they're doing. The hard part isn't the VM. The hard part is the long fought functional yet secure sandbox that a browser provides.

bsder 1y ago
> functional yet secure Secure? Debatable. Functional? Not really. For example, try accessing a security key and watch the fun. Sure, if you access it exactly the way Google wants you to, things kinda-sorta work, sometimes. If you don't want to obey your Google masters, good luck getting your Bluetooth or USB packet to your security key. And because you are "secure", you can't store anything on the local hard drive. Oh, and you can't send a real network packet either. All you can do is send a supplication request to a network database owned by somebody else that holds your data--"Please, sir, can I have some more?". The fact that this prevents you from exporting your data away from cloud-centered SaaS providers is purely coincidental, I'm sure. </sarcasm> So in the name of security we just kneecap the end users--if the users can't do anything, they're secure, right? Diana Moon Glampers would be proud.
- jayd16 1y ago
  I'm not sure what any of that means but people like wasm because the web sandbox does work for many cases. No one is saying it solves every single use case and it doesn't need to.

wyldfire 1y ago

> ... document browser ... document reader ... I'm going to assume you're being sincere. But even the crustiest among us can recognize that the modern purpose for web browsers is not (merely) documents. Chances are, many folks on HN in the last month have booked tickets for a flight or bought a home or a car or watched a cat video using the "document browser". > If we think we need a more thoroughly virtualized machine than traditional operating system processes give us (which I think is obvious)... Like ... the WASM virtual machine? What if the WASM virtual machine were the culmination of learning from previous not-quite-good-enough VMs? WASM -- despite its name -- is not truly bound to the "document" browser.

DonHopkins 1y ago
Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445 https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser... >Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).”
pjmlp 1y ago
We have, but not by choice, I miss my native apps, even though ChromeOS Platform pays the bills.
- adrianton3 1y ago
  > booked tickets for a flight or bought a home or a car or watched a cat video Would you install a native app to book a flight? One for each company? Download updates for them every now and then, uninstall them when you run out of disk space etc I can ask the same question about every other activity we do in these non-native apps.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    I have installed all them on the phone, so yes. Unfortunely several of them are glorified webviews. I am old enough to have lived through the days Internet meant a set of networking protocols, not ChromeOS Platform. And on those days hard disks were still bloody expensive, by the way.

xmichael909 1y ago

Personally not a fan of Windows 95 in the browser, however the browser stoped being a “document reader” a decade ago it’s the only universel, sandbox runtime, and everything is moving in that direction ... safe code. WASM isnt a worst VM; it’s a diffrent trade off: portable, fast start, capability scoped compute without shiping a OS. Raw device still have their place (servers). If you need safe distribution + performance thats “good enough” WASM in the browser is going to be the future of client.

oblio 1y ago
A decade ago? Gmail was launched in 2004, 21 years ago.
- blackoil 1y ago
  XMLHttpRequest was part of IE5 in 1999 as an ActiveXObject. Outlook Web team built it a year earlier.
- ifwinterco 1y ago
  Not to mention Java applets which is how you would do this sort of thing in the early 2000s

imoverclocked 1y ago

There are projects to run WASM on bare metal. I do agree that we tend to run a lot in a web-browser or browser environment though. It seems like a pattern that started as a hack but grew into its own thing through convenience. It would be interesting to sit down with a small group and figure out exactly what is good/bad about it and design a new thing around the desired pattern that doesn't involve a browser-in-the-loop.

syndeo 1y ago
> run WASM on bare metal Heh, reminds me of those boxes Sun used to make that only ran Java. (I don’t know how far down Java actually went; perhaps it was Solaris for the lower layers now that I think about it…)
- imoverclocked 1y ago
  With hypervisors and a Linux kernel doing the heavy lifting, the WASM on bare metal probably just looks a lot like a regular process. I would bet Sun did similar … minus the hypervisor. I do miss the Solaris 10/OpenSolaris tech though. I don’t know anything that comes close to it today.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Solaris is still around, while OpenSolaris forks support Oxide endeavours.
    - imoverclocked 1y ago
      Technically, yes. I built+ported a majority of Debian packages onto Nexenta OS but that effort (and many parallel efforts) just vanished when Oracle purchased Sun. I don't miss SVR4 packages and I never grew fond of IPS. So many open-source folk warned of the dangers of CDDL and they were largely realized in fairly short time. Unsurprisingly, #opensolaris on irc also had a precipitous drop-off around the same time. dtrace/zones/smf/zfs/iscsi/... and the integration between them all was top notch. One could create a zone, spin up a clone, do some computation, trash the filesystem and then just throw the clone away... in very short time. Also, that whole loop happened without interacting with zfs directly; I know that some of these things have been ported but the ports miss the integration. eg: zfs on Linux is just a filesystem. zfs on Solaris was the base of a bunch of technology. smf tied much of it together. eg: dtrace gave you access all the way down to individual read/write operations per disk in a raid-z and all the way up to the top of your application running inside of a zone. One tool with massive reach and very little overhead. Not much compels me to go back to the ecosystem; I've been burned once already.

RussianCow 1y ago

The browser removes the friction of needing to install specialized software locally, which is HUGE when you want people to actually use your software. Figma would have been dead in the water if it wasn't stupidly simple to share a design via a URL to anyone with a computer and an internet connection.

zeroq 1y ago
I can't shake the feeling that this ship has sailed and only a few got to get on it while it happened. And this comes from someone who started with Flash, built actual video editing apps with it, and for the last 25 years build application with "it's not a web app, it's a desktop app that lives in a browser" attitude [1]. Even with Flash we often used hybrid approach where you had two builds from same codebase - a lite version running in the browser and an optional desktop app (AIR) with full functionality. ShareObjects and LocalConnection made this approach extremely feasible as both instances were aware of each other and you could move data and objects between them in real time. The premise is great, but it was never fully realized - sure you have few outliers like Figma, but building a real "desktop app" in a browser comes with a lot of quirks, and the resulting UX is just terrible in most cases. [1] just to be clear, there's a huge difference between web page and web app ;D

chrsig 1y ago

Think of it like emacs. Browsers are perfectly good operating systems just needing a better way to view the web.

mwcz 1y ago
That's too true to be funny!

FpUser 1y ago

I a 64yo fart. Started programming with machine codes. Native is my bread and butter. Still have no problems and am using browser as a deployment platform for some type of applications. Almost each thing has it's own use.

willtemperley 1y ago

Plenty of people still want local-first apps that function offline.

djxfade 1y ago
Totally possible today with modern SPA technology that all major browsers support
- willtemperley 1y ago
  So where are they?
  - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    Flutter?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - willtemperley 1y ago
      Is Flutter an SPA framework?
      - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
        Yes
- pjmlp 1y ago
  You mean the convoluted enginnering exercise of service workers, in-browser proxies, and in-browser databases to simulate something native platforms don't need to care about?

blackoil 1y ago

Security model of web is needed to be brought to the OS.

ivell 1y ago

I would argue that as soon as it was decided to include JavaScript runtime in the browser, it stopped being a plain document browser. From then on, we were just on the evolutionary path of converting it from a low capability app sandbox to a highly capable one.

flohofwoe 1y ago

The problem is: even us old timers can't deny nor change the fact that operating systems have been putting up barriers to disallow running untrusted code downloaded from the internet. Try to distribute an installer on Windows that isn't signed with an extensive EV-certificate for instance. It's scare popup galore. Not to mention the closed gardens of the Apple and Google Stores which even when you get in, you can be kicked out again for absolutely no objective reason (they don't even need to tell you why). > then we should be honest and build a virtualization abstraction that is actually what we want, This is not in the interest of Microsoft, Google or Apple. They can't put the open web back into the box (yet, anyway), but they will not support any new attempts to create an open software ecosystem on "their" platforms.

pjmlp 1y ago
Just wait until the Web finally becomes ChromeOS Platform, after the Safari barrier is out of the way.

GeneralMaximus 1y ago

There is no difference between a "document" and an "app". There has never been a difference between the two, it's a purely artificial distinction. Word and LibreOffice "documents" can run embedded macros. Emacs has `org-mode`, which can call out to any programming language on your $PATH. A PDF document is produced by running code in a stack-based virtual machine. Even fonts have bytecode instructions embedded inside them that are used for hinting. If by "document" you mean "static text with no executable bits", then only plain text files can truly be called documents. Everything else is a computer program, and has been since the dawn of computing.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
incrudible 1y ago
I don’t think the total dissolution of a blurry boundary is a useful act. Yes, many document formats become Turing complete and run Doom eventually, but there is still a notable practical distinction between the intent to create a document interpreter versus an application framework.
muyuu 1y ago
the loose implication is that documents don't have access to resources outside of itself and they're somewhat static imo when you start talking about dynamic documents the distinction starts to blur but it should be fine if it's just a few parameters that are meant to be manually updated... beyond that "document" seems like the wrong term (and tech) those artificial distinctions are essential and perfectly practical as they can convey expectations just fine GP is correct in that the browser has generalised to a point it has clear drawbacks for its original intended purpose, but that is just a fact of life at this point IMO, html should have scaled back from 5.0 to the feature-set of 4, if not 3, with mass deprecations and beyond that it shouldn't be called html even if the main browsers carried on adding features and interoperable OS-like characteristics, so people could see beforehand if they were visiting hypertext documents or application sites, because certainly most of the web right now could not be reasonably called "hypertext" but that isn't the way it was handled and tbh it was to be expected
1y ago

Certhas 1y ago

PostScript is turing complete. SVG almost got the ability to open raw network sockets. Word files were (are?) a common platform for distributing malware.

RiverCrochet 1y ago

The browser became an app engine so app developers could escape the Wintel monopoly that was pretty tight in the 90's and 00's when the Internet became a thing. These days, it's so there can be apps outside of app stores. There's been various attempts to build "Internet operating systems" that are little more than a browser (that's what Chrome OS was intended to be in the beginning I thought) but Windows and it's pre-internet legacies are so entrenched in PCs and corporate life that nothing's ever gonna change there until Microsoft makes the entirety of Windows an app.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

.NET does this and nowadays you can compile most of your .NET code to machine code, it only keeps bytecode for the reflection pieces of code, but everything else is Ahead of Timed iirc basically you get all the VM benefits, and some native speeds in one go.

scotty79 1y ago

Basically OS developer dropped the ball. Internet caught them by surprise and few decades is apparently too short for them to come up with new appealing abstractions to fit the new environment. So browser developers took over and did just that. Same way webdevs ate desktop app dev's lunch because they had no idea how to innovate on decade old ideas. To sum up, no matter how well you are positioned for something on paper, if you won't do it, someone else will.

sharts 1y ago

The browser has become the operating system for a while now because native OS things were too fragmented and too slow to keep pace with what people wanted.

tester756 1y ago

I feel way safer using apps inside web browser than installing / executing them directly on my PC.

retrochameleon 1y ago

I'm a fan of the browser becoming a sandbox for much more than "documents". It has the most developed, flexible, and powerful UI system ever, it established numerous standards that pervade modern software development, and it's already available as one of the most cross-platform standard utilities. If the browser sandbox is a reliable cross-platform sandbox, the potential to develop and distribute software is huge. Progressive Web Apps are awesome because you can visit the website and use it normally, and then click a button to "install" the website to your device. If designed correctly, the website can work offline. By doing this, you get free distribution, automatic updates, no app stores, an excellent platform to develop an app on top of (the browser), etc. I think PWAs are the future, but the web platform still has some ways to go. There are numerous amazing examples of what you can accomplish with PWAs in their current state, though.

300hoogen 1y ago

lmfao